When Novell and Microsoft announced their unlikely partnership, a part of the arrangement that got little attention at the time was that they'd create a joint research facility, where both company's technical experts would collaborate on new joint software solutions. Now, they're staffing up.

I have yet to see any evidence that Novell isn't committed to giving back to the community. They've open sourced projects such as YaST, their build service generates .rpm's and .deb's, and they've consistently released their "Novell only" (slab, new KDE menu, OOo improvements) back to the community.

Those are Linux technologies. Logically, if Microsoft were going to help with "interoperability", it would (as the only vendor capable of doing so) be concentrating on integrating Linux technologies into Windows, and/or releasing specs or source code to allow Linux to interoperate with Windows. There is little to no evidence that they are doing that - indeed, all the evidence points to the fact that Novellīs management, having been shafted by Microsoft in the past (and come on, we all know how that feels), couldn't wait for them to do it again.

Microsoft knows that Linux users' worst nightmare is having Linux contaminated by Microsoft "IP", which is the number one (and perhaps the only) reason they are doing this - to make the nightmares come true and set the stage for pwning computing for the next 25 years as well as the last.